On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a bill prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin in schools, workplaces and public accommodations.

With its 50th anniversary now upon us, Todd S. Purdum fittingly commemorates this landmark law with “An Idea Whose Time Has Come” (Henry Holt, 416 pp., $30), his lively, informative account of the story behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Purdum, a former New York Times correspondent and currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, significantly reshapes our understanding of the law’s passage. In most tellings – including the latest installment of Robert Caro’s magisterial LBJ biography and “All the Way,” the current Broadway play starring “Breaking Bad’s” Bryan Cranston – Johnson receives the lion’s share of the credit.

This book’s considerable virtue lies in spotlighting dozens of others – congressmen and staff, Justice Department officials and civil rights leaders emphasizing “the fierce urgency of now” – who toiled to make the act a reality.

The author also demonstrates, both for worse and for better, that the past is indeed a foreign country. Fifty years ago, and a century after the Civil War, African-Americans suffered under the toxic racism of the Jim Crow South. Yet Washington was a different town then.

Political arguments were heated, but bipartisan collegiality existed among those doing the people’s business. Working together, Republicans and Democrats helped end the Dark Ages of civil rights by crafting one of the most important laws in American history. Ultimately, Purdum shows how “politics,” all too often a dirty word, can at its best be a noble calling.

The act’s genesis lay with President John F. Kennedy. He and his brother Robert, the attorney general, came to the cause of civil rights reluctantly and only because the cascade of events – Freedom Riders, James Meredith’s attempt to enroll at Ole Miss, Bull Connor’s unspeakable brutality in Birmingham, Ala. – propelled them there.

On June 11, 1963, JFK addressed the nation to call for a comprehensive act ensuring full legal equality for black Americans. In “the most eloquent and perhaps the bravest” words he ever spoke, JFK framed the issue as a moral one, “as old as the Scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution.”

Congress, with its seniority system and the prerogatives of long-serving Southern Democratic committee chairs, was historically a “notorious graveyard of civil rights legislation.” Now it became the center of action. Passing a meaningful bill required forging a coalition of small-government Republicans and liberal Northern Democrats.

Purdum hails numerous figures on both sides of the aisle, but one man stands out as the hero of his narrative, a little-remembered Republican congressman from western Ohio named Bill McCulloch. A “strong-willed, small-town lawyer” and “the most fair-minded of men,” he comes across here as a character from a Frank Capra movie.

Deeply respected for his probity, McCulloch supported the bill even though his district was less than 3 percent African-American. In so doing, he brought many of his fellow Republicans along with him. He became “the conscience of the bill,” in the words of one insider, and “the single most important influence in passing” it.

Still, the real possibility of death by Senate filibuster loomed. Senate rules then required 67 votes to invoke cloture and end debate.

Although a blow-by-blow account of various parliamentary maneuvers and cloakroom horse-trading may sound less than gripping, Purdum conveys a palpable sense of excitement akin to that created by Steven Spielberg in his recent film “Lincoln” in describing how the bill’s backers finally broke the longest filibuster in Senate history. It then passed overwhelmingly.

With the battle won, Everett Dirksen, the legendarily bombastic Senate minority leader, grandly paraphrased Victor Hugo: “No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.” More earthily, House Republican leader Charlie Halleck said, “Once in a while a guy does something because it’s right.”

Fittingly, the modest Ohioan, Bill McCulloch, struck the most eloquent balance between purple and prosaic, declaring that “twenty million Americans can, for the first time, dream some dreams, and in due course see nearly all of them come true.”

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